Can science help detect a fake among rare vintages?

I can understand that most of us probably don’t have much sympathy for collectors of old wine, an indulgence best left to multi-millionaires. But it seems a growing problem among such people concerns the true provenance of their old bottles.

But is it real?

The problem recently burst into public consciousness with the case of a German wine merchant peddling a possibly fraudulent collection of wines that he claimed included vintages once owned by Thomas Jefferson. (Read a delightful account in the New Yorker, here.)

How, then, to tell the fake stuff from the real stuff? It’s impossible to do, it would seem, without opening the bottle. And it’s easy to see why that’s not an ideal solution for a collector.

Among a raft of other technologies now marketed to winemakers are seals with an air-bubble “fingerprint”; bottles, labels and corks with botanical DNA; nanotech tracers embedded in bottles or labels; and radio-transponder chips implanted in corks. Other technological innovations make it harder for fake wines to go undetected on the back end.

Owners of questionable but expensive collections are understandably reluctant to sacrifice one bottle to determine the authenticity of the others, but a nuclear physicist at the University of Bordeaux has devised a noninvasive radiometric method that accurately pegs any wine made since 1953 to the year of its origin. Now you can have your wine and date it, too.

That radiometric method sounds pretty cool. I wonder when they’ll come up with something similar for humans, so we can peg the year of our own origin. That would come in handy for little league baseball.

” Behind the electronic gates and freshly clipped hedges of an exclusive cul-de-sac, the thieves worked in the dead of night, ignoring watches, laptops and other ho-hum booty to cart away the ultimate prize: 450 bottles of wine, including a rare $11,000 1959 magnum from the Château Pétrus in Bordeaux, France.”

…

” Thus began what the police in this Silicon Valley town, one of the country’s most affluent ZIP codes, refer to as “the big wine caper” — a $100,000 theft, still under investigation, whose audacity has inspired Agatha Christie-like fascination among sophisticated oenophiles in the Bay Area.”

” Like a sauvignon blanc with an ash-covered chèvre, theft and wine make a heady pairing, especially in Atherton, the sought-after nesting place of venture capitalists and magnates like Charles Schwab, of the wealth management company, and Tom Proulx, the founder of the software company Intuit. Wine cellars are a fixture of daily life here, a common amenity along with home theaters, fitness centers and his-and-her offices.”

” “The properties in Atherton are so large that it’s possible to imagine no one would notice,”

:^D :^D :^D :^D :^D :^D :^D

” In 2005, major auction houses in the United States and abroad sold $166 million worth of wine, Mr. Matthews said. ”

” Last year, sales rose to $240 million, with numerous world records, like the 50 cases of 1982 Mouton-Rothschild that sold for $1.05 million at Sotheby’s.”